Quick Shot review 6:
XTrac Pro and Zoom mouse pads

Review date: 13 October 2003.
Last modified
03-Dec-2011.

I think it's fair to say that the computing world is not under-supplied
with deluxe mouse pads.

Back before all-surface optical mouses existed - when, never mind speed
and precision, a good mouse pad could save you considerable roller-cleaning
time - there was the 3M
Precise Mousing
Surface. The unfortunately-acronymed
PMS beat
the heck out of the awful oblongs of wetsuit fabric and medium-hard plastic-fronted
company-advertising mats that were the only other options besides a piece
of paper or a bare desk, but it was rather high friction, and very easy
to damage.

The Pro's a very floppy rubber-backed mat which is possibly the single
most rubbery-smelling thing, weight for weight, I have ever encountered.

Users who aren't instantly struck dead by
Multiple
Chemical Sensitivity symptoms upon taking the Pro out of its packet
may think it's just a slimmer version of an old-style wetsuit-fabric mat.
It's a bit bigger than the bad old mats, at 8.5 by 11 inches (well, officially;
the Pro I got for review is more like 8.5 by 10.5 inches), and it's a scant
eighth of an inch thick. But it's got a cloth front and a grippy rubber
back, which may well bring back bad memories.

Fortunately, the Pro is not an old fashioned mouse mat. I was
very pleasantly surprised by how slick it actually turned out to be; its
fabric face means it's inescapably a higher-drag mat than the Everglide
Giganta Optical I usually use (and reviewed here),
but it's really pretty darn smooth. It's not "sticky", either; you need
very little effort to start the mouse moving.

The Pro also feels nicer on the heel of your hand than a plastic mat,
if you ask me.

The Pro in close-up. Click the image for an extreme close-up.
The surface is only mildly fuzzy, so it shouldn't gum up opto-mechanical
mouses. Opticals don't care, of course; seldom does fluff or dust manage
to impede the view of the tiny camera inside an optical mouse, and if it
does you can just blow it out.

XTrac say the distinctive dithered-hexagons pattern printed on their
mats will help optical mouses track better, and I dare say it is
pretty close to an ideal imaging surface. Practically any non-transparent
surface with a bit of texture to it will do for modern optical mouses, though;
it's quite hard to find a mouse mat, or non-polished desk for that matter,
on which opticals won't work well. For what it's worth, though -
if your optical mouse sticks, skips or jitters when you use it on an XTrac
pad, and you've already cleaned its lens, then it's definitely time to get
a new mouse.

The Zoom mat has the same pattern as the Pro, but it's printed larger.
The Zoom has the same official 8.5 by 11 inch size as the Pro, and the Zoom
I got for review actually is that big.

The Zoom's really thin, though; about 0.7mm. XTrac say that this means
you can tuck it under one side of your keyboard without making the 'board
wobbly or obviously tilted, and they're right. There's actually a point
to this, because the Zoom's slick white rubber back doesn't stick it to
the desk as well as the Pro's seriously non-slip backing. Tuck the edge
of the pad under the keyboard feet, and it won't be going anywhere.

The face of the Zoom is a fairly hard, very thin plastic layer, with
the sort of micro-mountainous textured finish that every hard plastic mouse
pad has. The Zoom's finish makes it very slick - about as low-friction as
a new Everglide, I think.

That surface in detail. The tough plastic can be cleaned very easily,
as with all hard plastic mats.

In use, the Zoom felt to me like various hard plastic mats, except a
bit warmer under my hand. Its texture is finer than that of most hard mats,
and it's a bit slicker than the polyethylene Everglide Optical I was using
before - but the Optical's been worn in for quite a few months now, so it's
not as slick as it was when new. As with
grooved
racing tyres, the more you wear a textured mouse mat, the closer it
gets to being completely slick and the more grip it has. Unlike
almost all tyres
though, grip is a bad thing for mouse mats.

I made a token effort at scientifically measuring the actual relative
friction of the three pads. To wit, I rigged up a contraption involving
a tea
mug, a plastic bag, some thread, a set of hemostats one of whose smooth
finger-holes served as a low friction thread-bearing, and various small
dense objects. Regrettably, I did not photograph this arrangement, which
means dictionary entries for the word "gimcrack" will have to remain forever
without their most perfect possible illustration.

Anyway, I found the assortment of objects needed to pull the mug across
the Pro, the Zoom and my Everglide, and then weighed those assortments.
I used the mug rather than a mouse partly because the mug had a handle I
could tie the thread to, and partly because mouses just move too easily
over slick mats. I wanted to wind up the friction to make the operation
less fiddly.

The Pro needed 209 grams of stuff before the mug moved consistently.
The Zoom needed only 142 grams. This lined up pretty well with my experience
of pushing a mouse around on them; it's hardly a precision measurement,
but I think it's pretty much
right.

The Everglide, however, needed a mere 85 grams, which didn't add up.
The Zoom and the Everglide felt much the same when I moved an actual mouse
around on them.

By the advanced diagnostic procedure of pushing things with my finger
while scowling at them, I concluded that the glazed pottery of the mug just
happens to grip the XTrac plastic better than it grips the Everglide surface.
I've Mouse Waxed the Everglide mat more than
once, so that could account for it too.

Buying one

XTrac pads are available from
several dealers, for
several different prices. The Pro sells for less than $US10, on average,
ex shipping; the Zoom averages less than $US14. More places sell the Zoom
than sell the Pro, because there's a newer "Pro
HS" with a Zoom surface on Pro backing, which many dealers seem to be
selling instead of the original Pro.

Whatever XTrac pad you get, you're looking at pricing that's pretty much
on par for fancy mats - "on par" being defined as "about the same as
Everglide charge". Everglide mats
haven't always been good value - their dalliance
with cheap but quick-wearing polystyrene didn't win them any friends - but
it's hard to justify spending much more than this on a mouse mat, unless
it's some spectacularly gorgeous embroidered, inlaid and animated showpiece
made by
gnomes in another dimension.

Overall

The XTrac Pro is, I think, a great mouse mat for anybody who likes a
higher drag surface than plastic mats provide, but who doesn't want a really
draggy old-school pad. The fuzzy microfibre MicroTracker pad I reviewed
here is a better choice if you like a
lot of friction, as some people do. Practically no gamers like high-drag
pads, but, I'm sorry to say, there's more to computers than playing games.
If you don't want tons of drag but do want a nice cloth pad, though,
an XTrac Pro is a quite safe buy.

The XTrac Zoom is super-light, super-thin, not particularly creaseable,
very slick, and cool looking, too. If you can buy quality hard plastic mats
where you live but would have to send away for a Zoom then I don't think
there's much justification for getting one, and I also have no data on how
fast the Zoom will wear out. But, for about the same money as a hard plastic
mat, the Zoom's a good-sized thing that gets the job done and will save
you some grams in your LAN party bag.

Does the world need yet more mouse mat options? No, not really. But if
every other premium mouse mat vanished tomorrow and all we could use was
XTrac products, we'd be fine.